FamilySearch Pilot Search Copy and Paste Process

At our last program on June 8, 2010 a question was raised about the difficulty of being able to copy data that is seen in a record from the FamilySearch Pilot Project to another location. We are used to being able to highlight material we find on the web and just copy and paste as we see fit. It does not work that way for this data that is found in the Pilot Project data.

You can copy and paste from the FamilySearch Pilot Search Project. You just have to use the tools that FamilySearch provides from within the results of the search and the data you find.

Here is the text of an e-mail I received from a participant at the program that describes his efforts to copy and paste. I have also verified that this is easily done from the FamilySearch web site in the Pilot Search.

The text of the e-mail sent to me follows in Bold and Italics:

Tony,

At this week’s meeting, during your demonstration of FamilySearch’s Pilot Record Search, somebody asked about a problem with trying to do a copy-paste from the text transcript window for a record. I tried this at home and found that indeed the traditional method of selecting text on the screen does not work, but they do provide an alternative in the form of the “Copy” button that appears above the record. When you click on “Copy” it will copy the text to your computer’s clipboard and then you can switch to your word processing application of choice and execute the Paste command. Below I have done a Paste from an example of this type of copy.

Bruce

Name: John Chown

Gender: Male

Baptism/Christening Date: 07 Jul 1831

Baptism/Christening Place: INDEPENDENT,BRIGSTOCK,NORTHAMPTON,ENGLAND

Birth Date: 29 Sep 1830

Birthplace:

Death Date:

Name Note:

Race:

Father’s Name: Thomas Chown

Father’s Birthplace:

Father’s Age:

Mother’s Name: Mary

Mother’s Birthplace:

Mother’s Age:

Indexing Project (Batch) Number: C07446-1

System Origin: England-ODM

Source Film Number: 825336

Reference Number:

Collection: England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975

As you can see, the process works well. You do not have to laboriously re-type anything. Just use the “Copy” command from the record you found that is of interest to you. This copies the data to your clipboard. Just paste the clipboard data to a blank Word document or to wherever you want to save the data. You can then choose the data for your own use in your research into some other document.

You will also notice that the “Field Names” are copied even if there is no data in the field itself. This allows you to see the the total amount of data that might have been able to be captured.